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The same in sev­er­al places

If you assign cat­e­gories to the email, you do not have to choose just one fold­er to see it. Instead, it appears both when you ask Out­look to show all emails for one cat­e­go­ry and when you ask it to show all emails for another.

Which cat­e­gories should you have?

But how should you think when cre­at­ing the cat­e­gories you are going to use? Should you nec­es­sar­i­ly have one for every cus­tomer, every project, or every type of email you receive? Do you have to build a struc­tured sys­tem of categories?

I do not think so.

I sug­gest that you cre­ate the cat­e­gories you think you will ben­e­fit from right now and then let them evolve over time.

Do this

1. Think about which cri­te­ria you might, from time to time, want to view the emails by. Is it, for example:
   • all that con­cerns a cer­tain project
   • all that con­tains some kind of report
   • all that are an order
2. Set­tle for the ones you come up with right now and cre­ate cat­e­gories for each of them.
3. Cre­ate quick steps that set each cat­e­go­ry and assign a key­board short­cut for every quick step so that you can cat­e­go­rize an email with a sin­gle keystroke.
4. To eas­i­ly see all emails that have a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry going for­ward, cre­ate a search fold­er that shows emails with the cat­e­go­ry or mark the cat­e­go­ry as a favorite in the cat­e­go­ry list. In both cas­es, you get some­thing in your fold­ers that looks like a fold­er, but in real­i­ty it shows all emails in a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry, regard­less of which fold­er they are in.

Quick­ly out of sight instead of doing the splits

If you let the cat­e­gories in Out­look grow based on your needs, you will ben­e­fit from this use­ful fea­ture with­out hav­ing to do a time-con­sum­ing struc­tur­al job to get start­ed. In addi­tion, you reduce the risk that emails get stuck doing the splits in the inbox between sev­er­al fold­ers. Instead, you can quick­ly get them out of the way after you have han­dled them, and you will still find them eas­i­ly when you need them. Neat, if you ask me.

How do you do it?

Which cat­e­gories have you cho­sen? Give me exam­ples. Email me and let me know. I am curi­ous to see how you do it.

(Look­ing for more tips for your inbox? Check out rules and fil­ters make the heavy email-load lighter!)